Fast Tracks to Intelligence (Considerations from Neurobiology and Evolutionary Biology)

Abstract

It is often assumed that the evolution of intelligence is inevitable, given the self-organizing seen in dissapative systems and the gradual shaping-up of Darwinism. While compound-interest reasoning suggests that small advantages will eventually triumph, eventually may be a very long time: there are few examples of rapid brain growth, suggesting that “smarter-is-better” is not a potent force for evolution. Fast tracks to complexity may be much more important than the slow-but-predictable paths (especially given the “windows of opportunity” in the life cycle of a planet).

Fast tracks are associated with 1) cycles of selection too frequent for gradual evolution to track, giving advantages to variants which can survive in either of several climates; and 2) novel functionality that emerges from combinations of mechanisms, each previously under natural selection for other uses. Thus frequent waves of natural selection (due to low tides, droughts, ice ages, 28 Myr mass extinctions, etc.) may play an essential role in compounding mechanisms from which new emergent properties can arise.

Intelligence in particular may involve a secondary use of neural machinery for rapid movements such as throwing; the same machinery can constitute a “Darwin Machine” handy for constructing candidate scenarios that tend to explain the past and forecast the future, from which one can select the best-seeming candidate. Since this Darwinian-like simulation of real-world properties can operate in milliseconds rather than millennia, using innocuous remembered environments rather than real-time noxious ones, it greatly augments what we call language and consciousness, key elements of the kinds of intelligence which can lead to a technology able to export knowledge.